This video essay, composed by Nam Lee, is focused on both analyzing ageism in media, particularly against elderly women, and exploring the ways in which this pattern is broken by Agnes Varda’s works in particular. Early on, the essay shows examples of aging women being seen as undesirable in media, with the particular irony being that it is similarly aging men that express being repulsed, playing into the double-standard around aging between genders. Varda’s work subverts this by changing the narrative of aging women away from the concept of direct interpersonal desire, and focuses on the internal beauty of the aging process, highlighting perspectives that are closer to an aging persons’ perspective on the world at large, and not the other way around. She also reframes the ideas of death and decay as those of metamorphosis, equating it to the spudding and growth of a potato.

In terms of the composition of the video, however, I found myself frustrated for the first time doing these. The essay is voiceoverless, relying on the footage and it’s audio as well as the text blocks to delineate chapters. What frustrated me the most was the transitions, especially those of superimposed text and those between chapters. They felt very sloppy in their presentation, often cutting the film or audio at awkward moments and fading in-and-out at a pace that was both too fast and too slow. A particularly frustrating transition was when a clip was slowly shrunk to make way for a five-shot frame, but the transition to adding these clips made the shrinking clip not match up graphically with it’s final resting place, on top of fading out right on top of the clip (also, several of the clips weren’t aligned symmetrically). Despite this, I did find the division of the frame into multiple shots to be fairly creative.